Tackle These 4 Challenges of Your IR Strategy and Win

With another year of uncertainty ahead, you have your fair share of challenges to face as an Investor Relations Officer (IRO). Here’s what could stand in your way for the next 12 months.

1. Targeting Value-Driven Investors

Today’s economic landscape complicates how you target new investors.

Record-breaking Inflation and the Fed’s inevitable rate hike have led to some pretty pessimistic forecasts about the year ahead, with most experts declaring the bear market will continue well into 2023.

These predictions can spook even the most stalwart of your investors, many of whom aim to tighten their portfolios to mitigate volatility.

While targeting is more complicated during an economic downturn, you can get a bead on investor behavior with the right IR tools from Q4. The latest IR solutions from Q4 prioritize targeting through cutting-edge engagement analytics.

Engagement analytics aggregates IR intelligence from your entire digital footprint, delivering key insights into new or targeted investors who interact with your brand. Using this information, you can accelerate meetings with these investors to underscore your value proposition at the perfect time.

2. Tech Siloes Concealing Vital Insights

Engagement analytics is at its most effective when it consolidates data gathered from a variety of IR tools. It synthesizes and analyzes IR intelligence typically segregated by different software. It tears down the digital walls of the average silo to deliver a full suite of tools in one program.

Unfortunately, most companies still rely on several apps to complete their day-to-day IR activities. These programs don’t speak to each other naturally, which puts the onus of identifying patterns and analyzing data on the individual.

If you’re working under a tech silo, you need to switch to a holistic program in the new year.

3. Reporting to C-Suite

IROs should provide strategic support to the board and C-Suite, but engaging management can be one of the hardest things you do. A disconnect between these departments can hinder your targeting efforts, so you need to address this in the new year.

Aggregating IR intelligence generated by your program into a single platform makes reporting on your impact easier.

By streamlining reporting with purpose-built IR tools, you can deliver key insights about targeted investors and their behavior more efficiently. As a result, your C-Suite will be better prepared for one-on-one meetings and capital markets events.

4. Twitter’s Blue Check Fiasco

Before Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the official blue check mark certified authentic brands, organizations, and public figures. Now, a subscription-based blue check verifies anyone willing to shell out $8 for the privilege.

You only need to look to accounts impersonating other brands to see how this can impact your IR strategy. A fake tweet from a “verified” Eli Lilly impersonator announced the pharmaceutical giant would supply its insulin for free.

The hoax cost the company billions when their shares nosedived following the tweet, not to mention innumerable PR damage as they issued a correction on their official Twitter.

This would be an opportune time to strengthen your IR narrative, upgrade your IR site, and evaluate your social media presence and the risk of staying on Twitter. Luckily, this blue-check fiasco comes at a time when most investors put more stock in your IR site than any other online source, including your Twitter account.

Bottom Line:

Changes in the social media landscape join other challenges of reporting, siloes, and targeting this year. But no challenge is insurmountable. With the right guidance and the appropriate tools, you can overcome any challenge your company faces in the new year.